Isa and Amelia Earhart

            Beneath the layer the sun can reach, the glare from morning clouds in her eyes, Amelia drops the yoke and descends to eight hundred feet in search of the ship’s lights.

            Her limbs tremble; she does not remember when she last ate. Her face burns from the South Pacific sun and whistling tropical winds. Her mouth is dry; there are no drops of water left to splash on her cheeks.

            "I’ve got to get back." She tries to count back through the hours and minutes, lightheaded from fuel dripping in the cockpit. "At least reach someone out there, somewhere."

            She reaches deep into her flight jacket pocket, the one she’s worn since the start of this journey, and feels a mass of dried out twigs—withered orchid stamens from those days early on in the Puerto Rican sun, most of their oil now gone, the strands twisted and brittle like the branches of those lace barks in Rangoon.

           Her cockpit fills with aromatic vanilla—the scent from that stolen evening several weeks back, when she realized she might never go home.

            Amelia focuses back on those first intentions: to carry the orchids secretly with her, replant their sensuous seeds then watch the blooms flower shamelessly toward her and her lover…

            She repeats into the lifeless radio: "We are on the line position 157-337."

            "Will repeat this message...We are running north and south."

            The plane feels weightless now from the drop in fuel. The gauge hovers close to empty.

            If she drops, how will they find her?

            "Who will hear my words?"

            Not able to see the ship, the island, or even the surface of the choppy Pacific through the dense morning fog, Amelia closes her eyes. She searches back through the days that brought her to this.

            How did she get here?

            It seems yesterday she was a thin woman of nearly thirty, pacing the tarmac and turning her back on an impending marriage. How did this happen? Will she make it back to her lover?

            "If I could only talk to my younger self," Amelia looks out at the expanse of morning, "what would I say?"

                                                                            ~

            Isa grew up searching for Amelia.

            Each year, since she was five, Isa would follow July like it was a fleeting kite, counting hopscotch through the scalding sidewalk afternoons and waiting for the twenty-fourth—the same birthday she shared with the elusive icon.